Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @05:58AM
from the throw-the-sand-against-the-wind dept.

hduff writes "While lithium-ion batteries offer better performance than lead-acid or ni-cad batteries, the supply of lithium is limited and the batteries can pose problems. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute are building a better battery with easily obtainable sand and air."

Oh and the commies are back already. And finished nationalizing the critical mining industries several years ago.

And they openly traded weapons with Iran and North Korea, boasted their strength and are currently dominoeing all neighboring countries to follow a socialist agenda. With Maoist rebels operating in the border territory against the still-capitalistic neighbor and all that.

Oh and the commies are back already. And finished nationalizing the critical mining industries several years ago.

I think you're confusing Chile with Bolivia.
Chile has one of the strongest growing economy in South America and is a capitalistic country alright.
Bolivia, on the other hand, has a socialist government and has been playing hardball with their lithium reserves.

I was of course thinking of Bolivia, which currently instigates all sorts of quarrels along their borders. They successfully installed metastases in neighboring countries and are clamoring for more, hence the term "Domino".

Of course we can always wait for the socialist dictatorship to snuff some *millions* in their inevitable joy camps and then just build a memorial. This would be sensible, cheap, safe, environmentally-friendly, politically-correct and deeply respecting the local culture and religion.

You can still do a lot wrong when you're doing nothing. I suggest we print more money and send it to them, that's what my great European Union does all the time - and boy, it works sooo well, just look at Somalia, where an entire new industry with thousands of jobs was created by paying hundreds of millions to free a few ships.

Wouldn't you know it. You turn the desert into an environment that supports agriculture and the very thing you got rid of in mass quantities turns out to be the main ingredient in the technology of the future. Doesn't that just rub you the wrong way.

Actually at the moment things are going from green to desert. Desertification is a major problem around the world, including Africa and China, where arable land is being lost to the expansion of major deserts.

And just to throw it in. It is man cause desertification. There isn't any question of this because it hasn't been made into a political issue. Goes to show that man can fairly easily and inadvertently change the face of the earth.

... man can fairly easily and inadvertently change the face of the earth.

Man also deliberately changes the face of the earth in an adverse manner, for purposes of warfare. In the ancient world, invading your neighbor's territory and destroying crops was a routine practice. See also: Salting the earth [wikipedia.org], Entomological warfare [wikipedia.org], Weather warfare [wikipedia.org].

While new battery technology is very important in our current time, the sheer number of duplicate stories and borderline advertisement/marketing stories on Slashdot about these new batteries, WITH a combines lithium FUD scare at the same time no less, sours these stories.

While new battery technology is very important in our current time, the sheer number of duplicate stories and borderline advertisement/marketing stories on Slashdot about these new batteries, WITH a combines lithium FUD scare at the same time no less, sours these stories.

Seconded. Does anyone else remember when Slashdot stories linked to journals and essays rather than blogs and press releases? Hopefully the click-through counts reflect the/. reader's ability to avoid anything with "blog" or "gadget" or perhaps these days even "google" in the URL.

I never made that relation. The reason I mentioned the UID was in hopes that it would carry more weight with the sites editors. Many of the low UID's can remember where the site came from and maybe they can help to inspire Taco et al to bring it back.

"...get some low UID's involved in this thread we can bump the IQ of the Slash Populous a notch above..." - Sorry but those words tricked my 5th percentile comprehension skills into thinking you were relating UID's and IQ.

Does anyone else remember when Slashdot stories linked to journals and essays rather than blogs and press releases?

The most frustrating submissions to me lately are ones that link to fluff articles ABOUT a real journal article, but don't actually link the journal article in question. Meta-meta-discussions tend to quickly devolve into chaos.

Does anyone else remember when Slashdot stories linked to journals and essays rather than blogs and press releases?

I'm no fan of blogs with one page of ads per paragraph, but the last time I checked, most scientific journals have a paywall in front of them. I thought the internet would eliminate the need for publisher middlemen between scientists, but most science is still locked away from society this way.

Interestingly you can say kaustik soda for sodium hydroxide in Swedish. Dunno if soda is an old name for natrium or if it's just that specific combination that is imported (swedish wikipedia didn't say and I'm to lazy to check elsewhere).

Sodium derives from modern Latin sodium, coined by Davy [probably this guy [wikipedia.org]] from middle ages Latin soda of arabic origins.
The origin of the element symbol is different. It comes from natrium, the middle ages name for sodium carbonate, Na2CO3, derived from Lati

Natrium is called SODIUM in English. (Not sure, but I think that English is the only language that does not use the word "natrium" for Na).

No, both are used very widely, actually: "Sodium" (from arabic suda: soda headache tablets) is used in most Romance and Slavic languages and "Natrium" (from ancient Egyptian natron: baking soda/soda ash) is used in Germanic languages and Hungarian/Serbocroatian, mostly due to the influence of Berzelius (who was a Swede).

The chemical name for mercury is "hydrargyrum" and I'm glad nobody uses that regularly. "Quicksilver" could follow the latin word best without bending the tongue of scientists and technicians beyond repair.

Actually, Spanish word for sodium is "sodio". Funny thing, as one would have expected it to be "natrio" instead (just substitute "o" for "um" and there you have a Spanish version of a Latin word). Which makes me wonder if someone at sometime forgot that sodium probably comes from Arabic, as per Wikipedia, and thought it was Latin instead.

Perhaps Spanish was influenced by the Arab presence in Spain during the Middle Ages?

Gerson Lehrman Group, a New York consulting firm, estimates that even if 500,000 cars powered by lithium ion batteries were produced in 2015, they would use less than 10 percent of last year's global lithium output. And global output continues to climb.

depends. right now were're surface mining lithium salts from exposed salt flats. theres no telling how many rich veins of lithium salts are hiding in valleys or near aquifers. i'm sure someone is working on that, but until someone runs analysis on where those veins might be i doubt anyone could tell you. more than likely battery technology will move beyond lithium long before (100 years?) we run out of lithium "ore" you can just shovel off the ground and into the back of a truck (Seriously, do a google imag

Peak Oil is scheduled since thirty years to happen any minute.Peak Copper is currently underway in Europe because valuable non-ferrous metals are pilfered where and whenever the police isn't looking for a second.But Peak IQ already happened in 1990 (google for "Flynn Effect", if you doubt it) but I think it was some sort of a pre-requisite for the other Peaks - with the exception of Peak Climate, which curiously follows the inverse of the Flynn Effect tren

A non-renewable energy resource such as oil is consumed by the process of using it as fuel -- i.e. it is destroyed (unless you're willing to wait millions of years for the carbon cycle to do its job). It also has a well-defined theoretical endpoint that would never be crossed: once it takes more energy to extract it than the oil contains, there's no point in extracting it. It's simple physics. And the practical economic threshold will be reached well before that poin

Would extracting lithium from the sea impact sea-life? I imagine if we started doing that and relying on it, our consumption would just keep spiralling upwards while there was a drawn-out global debate about what effect it is having, which gets resolved just in time to stop the human race dying out, but not in time to stop significant destruction to the marine ecosystem.

but i might just be being paranoid/pessimistic as i don't know anything about it.

There are some important differences though. Oil is used as an energy source, while lithium is used to store energy. When a battery reaches its end of life, the lithium can be extracted and used to make a new battery.

Also, a rising price of lithium means more lithium ore will become economical to mine. Because extracting oil takes energy, there is a point at which it is not worthwhile to extract the oil since you would have to burn more oil than you extract.

Besides, the price of lithium is currently a very small portion of the price of a battery. The price of lithium could rise to 10 times its current level and batteries would still be affordable. If the price of oil would rise to 10 times its current level, the impact would be huge.

Gerson Lehrman Group, a New York consulting firm, estimates that even if 500,000 cars powered by lithium ion batteries were produced in 2015, they would use less than 10 percent of last year's global lithium output. And global output continues to climb.

Of course, worldwide auto production is a lot closer to 10,000,000 per year....

More than 50,000,000 annually. Automotive World [automotiveworld.com] reported that global commercial vehicle production for 2008 was 70.5 million units, including 52.6 million passenger cars, 13.6 million light commercial vehicles, and 3.6 million trucks. Total production was down 10.8% from 2007 due to the effects of the world-wide recession. Production in China and India for local sales are increasing very rapidly.

Still in prototype (seems he might have only made one, and he tested it for 600 hours ). Not rechargable. More powerful than current hearing aid batteries. May be made rechargable in 10 years (how on earth do people estimate this stuff? How can you estimate how long it will take to do something no one has ever done? It might not even be possible). Rumors abound. If it works out it will be great, but don't hold your breath.

First of all (I'm a researcher in power MEMS/micro power sources), I must say that a battery that has been tested for 600 hours count as an excellent proof of concept. Most of the stuff we develop we're happy if it works for minutes, let alone hundreds of hours. This is in advanced stage. Second: so what if it's "only" a primary battery? The market for primary batteries is HUGE and because they are disposable, making them cheap and environmentally friendly is just if not more important, than with secondary batteries.

If the energy-to-weight and energy-to-cost ratios of that battery could reach even the general vicinity of gasoline, everything else concerning click-in systems or replacement is peanuts and will be invented less than one second after the battery itself. Of course we will have BluBattery and HD-Battery warring for dominance, but that's only a minor nuisance compared to the fact that we now could power cars, trucks, boats an

It can't.It's not possible to recharge in its current form, and will be comparatively expensive.Even neglecting that - and the poor discharge rate - it can probably only be discharged at a slow rate due to the design - it is a better hearing aid battery that might last - say - 20 days instead of 10, and be a bit less toxic.

You _could_ put it into your car - but it would require a truly massive battery.

More to the point, in 10 years time my girlfriend will have implants that can recharge my ipod. Obviously contactless power would be best; not sure USB piecings would go down too well.
I might even start saving for my own pec implants now.

The article does not help understand how it actually works, so I read around and went to the Technion-friends website.

Basically normal sand is Silicon-Dioxide. If you take pure silicon and build a battery from it, and expose the battery to air, the silicon will interact with the oxygen in the air. So the pure silicon will become silicon dioxide - sand. In the process, it releases energy.

The neat trick in the battery - is that they set it up so that the energy is released NOT as heat (which is the usual thing), but some of it as electricity. They do this with some kind of membrane that allows oxygen ions to flow through, but electrons must come the other way - hence an electric flow.

Like any innovation, will take some years to be fully researched and commercialized. Small batteries will probably come first, bigger ones (for cars) later. And how to recharge does not seem obvious - at least not from the description so far.

A lot of people above are skeptical - but really this kind of innovation is what science and engineering are all about. Innovation goes hand in hand with raising ever more questions; we should be used to that by now.

Really really cool. And smart. My hat off to the Israeli guys and their collaborators in USA & Japan.

I have read the original publication (doi:10.1016/j.elecom.2009.08.015) and cannot understand much of the (electro-)chemistry of it.The electrode potential is strongly dependent on the doping of the silicon, which makes sense, but the I/V curve looks less than impressive. It's mostly a bad fuel cell, at the moment.Also, the chemistry of the electrolyte is not clear to me. In principle the battery should work according to dissolution of Si from the anode, transport through the electrolyte (an ionic liquid with fluorine) and reaction with oxygen at the air cathode. The researchers claim that they observe a white deposit at the cathode, and that this deposit is SiO2.Silicon-fluorine chemistry is quite complicated, IIRC, and I cannot for the life of me imagine transport of Si4+ ions in the electrolyte. Also, HF as such does not dissolve Si, but it need some strong acid to start the etching. How this phenomenon can happen in the ionic liquid is beyond me.

Also, in the introduction, the researchers claim that the battery has an "infinite shelf life", but then talk about corrosion currents in the paper. If there is corrosion (i.e. self discharge), then the shelf life is quite limited.Cherry on top, they claim that SiO2 is easily reducible to reobtain Si. I am not familiar with silicon metallurgy, but I am not sure it is easy to do it electrochemically, let alone replate Si at the anode upon recharge.On the plus side, they used metallurgical grade Si, which is dirt cheap when compared to semiconductor grade Si.

I would love for this to work, but at the moment the authors have omitted quite a bit of information. If I were the referee, I would have asked at least the questions above. Think of it, there is a corresponding author for a reason.

Disclaimer: I work in battery research, and I am hence jealous that they made it to the front page of Slashdot.

If this is your specialty, then please contribute more good articles about new batteries. It's hard to sort through the "coming soon in 10 years to never" from "coming soon, works pretty dang good now, perhaps on sale as early as next year" from "on sale now, here is a link" stuff.

Battery tech to me today is sort of like solar PV tech. I've read hundreds of articles of new amazing break throughs, yet when I go check prices, the PV panels I got ten years ago are still a deal compared to what I see offered fo

(sorry may be some confusion - a double post since the previous one inadvertently was anonymous)

To better understand how this works, I went to the Tehnion website.

Sand is actually Silicon-dioxide (combined silicon and oxygen). Pure silicon interacts with oxygen form the air to create sand. That's first-year normal chemistry. Usually such an interaction produces heat not electricity.

They built the battery from pure silicon, and the trick is that Oxygen from the air has to pass through a membrane to get to the silicon and oxidize it. The membrane will allow only oxygen ions through, so electrons have to flow the other way to match up with the ions and maintain overall neutrality. Hence you get a current instead of only heat.

Of course it will take some years to commercialize. Small applications will come first (small batteries), only later will we get big batteries (for cars?) and even later rechargeable stuff (if at all).
I noticed many people are skeptical - but this is normal in science and engineering. Any real innovation raises new questions that must be answered.
Kudos to the Israeli team, and their collaborators from USA & Japan.

Wonderful, but there are an awful lot of warning signs that this thing is not a world-beater:

* It's not rechargeable. And I don't know of any simple electrochemical process that reverses the oxidation of silicon.

* It requires a Flourine-carrying electrolyte! Lithium is bad enuf, but Fluorine is really bad stuff.

* Usually "air-powered" batteries are limited to very low current, slow discharge applications, such as hearing-aids.So it's very unlikely these could ever work like in a laptop or car, where you need amps, not microamps.

* Any practical and competitive battery would have to have a good power-density and be stable and manufacturable at a reasonable price.

It requires a Flourine-carrying electrolyte! Lithium is bad enuf, but Fluorine is really bad stuff.

All Li-ion batteries carry a fluorine containing electrolyte. In particular, LiPF6 is the salt used, dissolved in organic solvents. Plus a whole bunch of additives.
The ideal salt would be a perchlorate, but being explosive it's not allowed.

Aluminum is OK as a transmission medium, but it's not too good in end use applications. Turns out aluminum has a property called "cold flow", when you put it under pressure (like a screw or clamp terminal) the metal literally moves away and creates a loose connection which causes heat and often fire.

Next, greatly varying expansion/contraction properties make aluminum still more likely to work loose when terminated to a dissimilar metal like a lug or screw of brass, steel, etc..

Lastly, all aluminum has a coat of oxide that has high electrical resistance, and it reforms very quickly when it is cleaned off. Proper cleaning and antioxidant paste are critical to avoid failures in such home applications as the line dropping from the service weather head to the meter socket of a dwelling (a common application).

Once the circuits are in the walls of a dwelling you do not want aluminum because of the fire danger. While it has been used for mobile home wiring in the past during times of high copper prices, it is currently hard to insure one of those homes. If you DO have aluminum wire inside your walls you should be checking the torque (but don't over tighten) of every connection at six month intervals... forever...

To sum up, you only want aluminum where you can easily inspect and adjust any connections on a regular basis.

Once the circuits are in the walls of a dwelling you do not want aluminum because of the fire danger. While it has been used for mobile home wiring in the past during times of high copper prices, it is currently hard to insure one of those homes. If you DO have aluminum wire inside your walls you should be checking the torque (but don't over tighten) of every connection at six month intervals... forever...

No, you retrofit it with copper ENDS (which attach with conductive epoxy) which don't have this problem. Guess what? We no longer use wires poked into holes in automotive applications anyway; all connectors are terminated somehow.

I once heard that Emerson (motor maker) uses 10-20 percent of the worlds electrical copper. Motors are a huge user of copper. I work in electric vehicles, and when we pump 100kW through a motor we're losing some 1.6 percent to heat in the windings. Change that to aluminum and the losses will only increase - and then the cooling solution becomes more complex, the weight goes up, the range goes down. Then there are the previously mentioned issues with aluminum. And to the GGP, all the easy copper has been mined, but I believe there is still plenty available to meet the inceasing demand. If handled properly it can be easily recycled too.

There was a (temporary) setup [wikipedia.org] along those lines at one point.

For Uranium isotope separation, they needed some large electromagnets. Unfortunately, WW2 was weighing rather heavily on the copper supply. Instead, they borrowed 13,000 tons of silver from the treasury.

You are aware that iron rusts like a bitch, right?There's also a lot more to worry about than electrical conductivity. You're passing a DC current through this which means you will have oxidation where this metal meets other metals if you aren't very careful.

This is why aluminum wiring in houses is a problem. The aluminum wiring is fine by itself, but if you try to use copper in the same house then you'll end up starting a fire in short order. In houses that DO have both Al and Cu in the walls, electrici

This is why aluminum wiring in houses is a problem. The aluminum wiring is fine by itself, but if you try to use copper in the same house then you'll end up starting a fire in short order. In houses that DO have both Al and Cu in the walls, electricians have to install special junctions that allow the two to meet without literally corroding each other.

Yeah, but the "special junction" is a copper wire with a butt connector filled with conductive epoxy and surrounded by heat shrink tubing. My mom has them installed in her 1970s double-wide, which of course has Aluminum wiring. You stick it on and heat it up and you're done. It would make more sense to go to 48VDC so that what metal the wire is made of matters less from every standpoint BUT corrosion, and then use stainless steel. Unlike Aluminum, you can reasonably solder it, provided you solder more stain

It isn't as big a deal as you make it sound. There are often light fixtures that use copper or aluminum wiring. If you don't get all the fixtures at one place there is a good chance you'll be mixing them up. And it isn't a real concern.

These alloys were cheaper if they are so easily obtainable, but I think there's a reason behind the price of stainless steel, which could be simple scarcity or high production costs.

A cursory glance at Wiki Grandma tells me that stainless steel requires a chromium content of 10 percent or more. And of course we have a singular dominant reserve: chromium is mined primarily in South Africa, harboring half the world's mineable reserves.

Not only that, but stainless steel is an even worse conductor than plain vanilla steel, having a resistance that is more than 30 times higher.

Not only that, but stainless steel is hard to work with. Doesn't bend easily. Doesn't machine easily. It's an OK wire (in some formulations) although not particularly strong and, as you note, has the irritating property of having high resistance. So no shiny love there.

I grew up a few hundred miles from a mine that shut down because other mines were more economical. As the price goes up, that sort of mine can start operating again (if they can convince people in the area to put up with the environmental impact).

According to Wikipedia, "total amount of copper on Earth is vast (around 1014 tons just in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, or about 5 million years worth at the current rate of extraction)". Of course only small fraction of this is available using _today's_ technology.

Specific Ampere hours don't tell much about the energy content, which is the crucial value in battery development.

The paper talks about a 1-1.2V battery, so we could assume it gets about 1 Wh/g or 1kWh/kg. 1 kWh = 3.6MJ, so this battery could reach about 3-4MJ/kg.

Gasoline or diesel are in the range of 40-50 MJ/kg, but the engine and ancilliaries are much heavier than a simple electric motor. This electric motor has a much higher torque than four-stroke gasoline engines and can sustain short bursts of much h

Why is the word "Israel" built into the company name? This smells of a psy-ops play for mind share.

So you argue that National Semiconductor is a CIA front (having "National" in its name and being American)? American Express was founded in 1850 but the olderst three-letter agency I can think of, the FBI, is half a century younger. Who does AmEx work for?

Also, this battery is interesting but hardly going to revolutionize the automotive world. From the specs they have released it sounds more like a replaceme

So we have "hey, let's use a company with a name that will immediately put all the conspiracy theorists on high alert to release research data about a somewhat nice but not very exciting new battery technology so they will let us get away with whatever we want". Sorry, but either the Israelis are complete idiots or this is not a scheme to somehow keep us from scrutinizing them.

You give the population of the Earth, (and certainly the internet), far too much credit, IMHO.